Cybersecurity risk relates, in some examples, to losses arising from compromise of sensitive data (e.g., payment data held by merchant or medical data held by health care providers), computer system penetration, compromise of personal information related to identity fraud, and eventualities of the like. These sorts of losses can arise from malefactors who adjust their actions in response to present-tense environmental variables governing opportunity: newly discovered exploits, recent trends in cyber security, and so on. Assessment of cyber security risk has heretofore relied heavily upon human capital, resulting in subjective risk assessments based upon individual experts' methods and professional background. Consequently, the factors that are significant in cyber risk assessment of an individual or an entity's systems, properties and facilities change rapidly, but their risk assessment continues to be performed by individuals and is therefore performed with a level of expertise that can be no better than the particular individual assigned to the task. Moreover, as risk factors emerge in one industry, knowledge of those factors tends to remain confined to professionals within that industry, leaving other industries vulnerable, and rendering the vulnerability assessments performed in those other industries under-informed.
An additional complicating matter in the marketplace for cyber risk assessment and mitigation is that third party services available for assisting an individual or enterprise in managing cybersecurity risk must be found and subscribed to on an individual basis. For example, an individual may seek out services to detect and prevent identity fraud, or to determine whether his or her personal information is already compromised and published on the dark web. A small or medium size business may, for example, seek secure managed virtual private network (VPN) services. These sorts of service are sold individually, and a consumer must hunt and peck from website-to-website to understand the array of offerings, and intelligently select from among them. Additionally, this hunt-and-peck process carries with it the possibility that a service provider or insurer loses the opportunity to provide services to a would-be client, in the event that the client leaves the provider's website to seek out companion services published elsewhere. It also raises the prospect that an insurer or service provider may be ignorant of one or more of the risk suppression services its client imposes because the service was subscribed to via another vendor, where the transaction was “out of sight” of the insurer or service provider.
There exists a need for risk assessment that is not beholden to individual subjective judgment, elimination of delays in identifying potential service providers and insurers for protecting against cybersecurity risk, and elimination of the present-day hunt-and-peck process for locating risk suppression services.
Additionally, it may be the case that the operator of the platform desires to assess the risk of users or the organizations they represent vis-à-vis more than one variety of hazard. For example, in addition to assessing cyber security risks, the operator of the platform may desire to assess the risk of the user or the organization he represents with regard to violation of a regulatory framework such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation or the United States' Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is inefficient to have to reprogram the platform to attend to each of these various hazards.
There exists a need to suppress database call load in such contexts and to allow for such platforms to be refocused from hazard to hazard while reducing the programming effort required for such refocusing.